Monday, June 22, 2015

At
the 2001 meeting that launched the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) the newly-fledged OA
movement outlined two strategies for making the scholarly literature freely
available. Later dubbed green OA and gold OA, these are now
the two primary means of providing open access, and both types have been mandated by
research funders in the UK. For instance, in 2013 Research Councils UK (RCUK) introduced an OA policy that favours
gold open access, and in 2014 the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) announced what is
essentially a green OA policy, which will come into force next year. So how does the future for open
access look?

Just to remind ourselves: With gold OA,
researchers publish their papers in an open access journal and the publisher
makes them freely available on the Internet as a natural part of the
publication process. With green, OA researchers continue to publish in
subscription journals, but then self-archive a version of their work in an open
repository, either a central repository like PubMed Central, or an institutional
repository. Meanwhile, the official version of the paper (version of record)
remains behind a subscription paywall on the publisher’s site.

BOAI did not specify that OA journals
should levy an article-processing charge (APC), but while OA advocates point
out that most OA journals do not
charge a fee, the reality (unless something changes) is that the
pay-to-play model is set to dominate OA publishing.

Importantly, this means that although
BOAI attendees assumed OA publishing would be less costly than traditional subscription
method, use of the APC will make scholarly publishing more expensive, certainly
during the transition to open access (which could last indefinitely).

And to the chagrin of OA advocates, much
of the revenue generated by APCs is currently being sucked up by traditional
publishers like Elsevier and Wiley, especially through the use of hybrid OA.

In reviewing the figures for 2013-2014,
for instance, Wellcome’s Robert Kiley reported
that Elsevier and Wiley “represent some 40% of our total APC spend, and are
responsible for 35% of all Trust-funded papers published under the APC model.”
(74% of the papers concerned were published as hybrid OA).

The story is similar at RCUK. As the Times Highernoted
in April: “Publishers Elsevier and Wiley have each received about £2 million in
article processing charges from 55 institutions as a result of RCUK’s open
access policy.” In total RCUK paid out £10m, which is in addition to the subscription
fees universities are already paying.

In effect, it would seem, traditional
publishers are in the process of appropriating gold OA, and doing so in a way that
will not only ensure they maintain their current profit levels, but that will
likely increase them. And the profits of scholarly publishers, OA advocates argue,
are already obscenely
high.

Almost OA

But green OA advocates maintain that this
is not inevitable, and have long argued that if implemented wisely, and
strategically, open access can squeeze out the excessive costs of scholarly
publishing, and so reduce publisher profits. However, they insist, this will only
happen if researchers self-archive their subscription papers rather than opt
for pay-to-publish. If researchers do this, they say, publishers will have to
compete with repositories for access provision, and so will be compelled
to downsize their operations. This in turn will put downward pressure on
costs (and thus any publishing fees). Only at the point where these costs have
fallen, argue green OA advocates, should researchers consider paying to
publish.